Opinion – Helio Beltrão: Culture of cancellation threatens democracy

A year ago the most famous dictionary in the United States, Merriam-Webster, considered that the terms “cancel culture” and “cancel” (new meaning) had reached their strict criteria for entry into the English language.

Until last year, “cancel” only referred to events, subscriptions, commercial orders, television series, and so on. It now refers to individuals, especially celebrities or anyone who has public visibility.

The act of canceling, in its naive sense, means criticizing and failing to honor someone for conduct considered questionable or unacceptable. It is certainly everyone’s genuine right to make the individual decision to ignore so-and-so. It has also always been a universal right to criticize, preferably honest.

However, canceling has consisted in the public call for a broad boycott of the offender, whose objective is to decree social ostracism through inclusion in the black list (white list?). The cancellers decree the sentence and call on the ignited mob to behave simultaneously as jury, judges and immediate vigilantes — without the right to defence.

This controversial sense is at the heart of “cancel culture”: a 24/7 patrol by the “awakened” (the “woke”), catalysts for the frenzy of unruly bullying and public humiliation of the metis.

This poses a threat to freedom of expression and democracy.

I thought to remember episodes of cancellation of leftist individuals in Brazil. In general, the canceling arrow has pointed to the right and to liberals, or to celebrities who don’t bother to flatter the progressive agenda of the awakened ones. But intolerance is a crazy arrow that can point in all directions.

The famous left-wing lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who often advises controversial clients such as Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, associates current intolerance with the McCarthyism of the 1950s in the United States, in his book “Cultura do Cancelação” (Clube Ludovico, LVM Editora, 2022) .

For him, although originated by the current “awakened” generation, cancellation is the bastard child of extreme right-wing McCarthyism and extreme left-wing Stalinism. The most potent face of McCarthyism, however, was not state power but the patrol of individuals, companies, universities and the media.

In November 2019, Barack Obama stated in a speech for young people that “society will not advance if we criticize and judge others full time” and that the criterion “of purity and just throwing stones will get no one anywhere”.

But chief patrollers think of themselves as demigods of virtue, they always know right and wrong, and they believe the world is black and white, without nuance, context, or ambiguity. They recline on their comfortable couch and feel wide awake because they mobilized their followers to expose and humiliate that guy who tweeted. The presumption is always guilt, a disgrace that creates a society of distrust (as described by Alain Peyrefitte).

Many go further and seek the dismissal and withdrawal of sponsorships from those who express a different opinion. It’s a bad idea, as the severity of punishment meted out by the court of public opinion is rarely proportionate to the slip.

Patrolling has the side effect of self-censorship. The common citizen’s fear of making jokes makes life more dull. The intellectual is silent because in a few years his speech can be excavated and taken out of context. Risk aversion contaminates artists, comedians, writers, book publishers and researchers: creativity and science are stifled.

In cancel culture, everything is dangerous, nothing is divine and wonderful, you have to be alert and strong. It is forbidden to forbid!